Southern Discomfort Memories Pi2

AJR Information Volume L No. 8 August 1995 £3 (to non-members) Don't miss ... Populists, terrorists and revisionists Is Guinness good for you? p5 Mid-Thirties Southern discomfort memories pi2 King Oedipus in hen a country's body politic goes rotten underdevelopment and maladministration. Haider Austria p/6 . the process has to start somewhere, and prospers because of the feeble denazification of Aus W this starting point is surprisingly often in tria, itself the result of the ludicrous Allied the South. While Berlin was still the capital of misconception that Hitler's birthplace was his first Weimar Germany, Munich was already Hauptstadt victim. Currently Austria is also the detection-proof A der Bewegung. Le Pen has captured three town halls hideaway of the murderous Bavarian Liberation along the Riviera; the Italian Neo-Fascists are Army {Bajuvarische Befreiungsarmee) - so called waming! strongest South of Rome; the biggest vote for a because they deny the existence of a separate Aus Fourth German Reich has been cast in Austria, trian nation - who target gypsies and liberal he uncer where Haider conjures up another Anschluss. politicians. tainty Geography has little to do with it. Interwar How does the UK fit into this overall picture? Is T surrounding Bavaria spawned Nazism in exaggerated reaction to there a danger of the British body politic putrefying the recent Austrian the left-wing Rdterepublik of 1919. Le Pen's success from a starting point in the South? Not on present compensation law in the South of France stems from de Gaulle's with showing - but complacency is a poor counsellor. has allowed drawal from Algeria after which a million returning Not all that long ago a BNP candidate topped the rumours to circu French colons settled in the region. Neo-Fascist poll in a ward at Tower Hamlets. Last month the fo late. One rumour strength in the mezzogiorno owes much to local cus of concern switched from council estates on the that needs scotch Isle of Dogs to crenellated Saltdean Castle in Kent. ing in no uncertain Its castellan, Alan Clark, argued on TV that Britain terms has it that should have made peace with Hitler in early 1941 to individual claim avoid further bloodshed and save the Empire. What ants will receive motivated Churchill to continue the war at the ex £10,000. The pense of 400,000 lives, Clark alleged, was pure global sum allo self-interest: a peace deal would have ended his cated by the premiership. mean-spirited The implications of Clark's thesis are monstrous. Austrian parlia It elevates Hitler - perfidy incarnate - into a po mentarians tentially trustworthy negotiating partner. If he was (against Green open to negotiation, he can't have been as black as Party opposition) is far too small for painted. He may, pace David Irving, not even have that sort of 'share- known about the Final Solution and such like hor out'. Not that rors. In which case these horrors may only have been there will be a an ex post facto justification for Churchill's war general share-out: mongering, and so on. it is intended that Let us close this particular Pandora's Box - but - as is only not before hyphenating Alan Clark's surname into reasonable - Petain-Clark (somehow befitting the owner of a hardship cases will Norman castle, don't you think?) Apropos of Mar receive priority. shal Petain: France still feels so mortified about its own deal with Hitler of fifty-five years ago that last For further infor month it pulped a brand new set of banknotes bear mation turn to The site of Prime Minister Eisner's assassination in ing the image of the Lumiere Brothers because the page 13.n 4 Munich, 1919. latter served the Vichy regime.D AJR INFORMATION AUGUST 1995 near Leipzig where anti-tank weapons and 'Our forgotten neighbours' Profile poison gas were manufactured. his is the title of an exhibition In January 1945 Koppel was trans currently on display at the Forty-Fiver ported to Theresienstadt on a 15-day T Museum of the Third District nightmare journey in which the train was (Landstrasse) of Vienna. It features docu oppel Kendall was born in 1927 in continually attacked by Allied planes. ments, photographs and letters from some the Polish market town of They "lived like animals," with no food inmates of the death camps, and many Bialobzegi, where the family iron and innumerable beatings. At the ap K proach of the Russian army, the camp other items referring to Jews who had mongery business supplied the local lived in the district. Originally, there were farming community. Koppel's father guards disappeared; those inmates with more than 13,000 Jews in the area, of prayed three times a day at the syna enough residual strength left the confines whom many succeeded in emigrating be gogue, and although Koppel attended the of the camp to meet their liberators. fore the outbreak of World War II. only school in town, which was Catholic, Just 17 when he first arrived in Britain, However, 3,648 people were deported to every afternoon he went straight on to the CBF sent Koppel first to the Lake Dis destinations in the East, such as the cheder. trict. Later he lived in a Habonim hostel Ghetto at Lodz, Opole, Riga and Minsk; This way of life was abruptly brought in Loughton and studied at WalthamstoW only 41 of these survived the Holocaust. to an end in 1940 when German forces Polytechnic, and was subsequently taken The exhibition also gives the visitor occupied the town, forcing its Jewish in under the wing of the Spiro family from some idea of Jewish daily life and the Fes habitants into a restricted ghetto area. His whom he learnt the bespoke tailoring tivals - the latter by means of an indoor father was taken away and suffered an trade. A willing and very fast learner, he Succah and some artifacts on loan from unknown fate. attended the Regent Street Polytechnic the community head office. In one room and the London College of Fashion where the names of all known residents after he was later to be a teacher himself. His March 1938 are inscribed in the walls in wife to be, Vivienne, unsurprisingly in alphabetical order. sisted that he change his name - so Herr Hauer, formerly curator of the mu 'Kandelzucker' became Kendall. seum, now retired, voluntarily undertook In 1956 he had the skills of a first class the monumental task of listing the names, gents bespoke tailor and the confidence to addresses and ultimate exile-destinations, open his own business in the Finchley where known. Details, which are obvi Road. "I wanted to be a great tailor," he ously incomplete, were gathered from the recollects, "so I made beautiful clothes. four corners of the earth and printed in Not Savile Row, but Finchley Row." book form of which there are only four Among his famous clientele were Sir Ger copies presently in existence. Such a task ald Nabarro MP and Max Bygraves; would have been almost impossible in any many of his customers were Jewish refu of the densely populated (Jewish) districts gees who settled in the area. His - 2, 9 and 20. It took Herr Hauer four shop-cum-workshop with its multifarious years to collect all this data. Before leav patches of cloth, a cutting table strewn ing we expressed the hope that the with buttons and thread, jackets and trou exhibition would be well attended by to sers lining the walls in different stages oi manufacture, all combine to create a com day's residents of the 3rd District, school Koppel Kendall parties and others to whom the fate of fortable ambience of apparent untidyness their former neighbours may still be of in In 1942 the 'town' was surrounded by essential to an Eastern European mastef terest. tanks and its inhabitants were given five tailor turning out his best work. D Fred and Therese Masserick minutes to evacuate. Koppel, who quite This comfortable ambience has, how literally ran for his life, was struck on the ever, been shattered twice in recent years- The exhibition will be open throughout head by a Polish policeman who knew On the first occasion Koppel had to fight September and October every Wednesday him and pushed into a line for those fit off an axe-wielding 'customer'; on the (4-6pm) and Sunday (10-12am). Karl enough to do work. It was the first re second an IRA bomb blew in his shop Hauer can be contacted at 7 Kranzgasse prieve of many that fate was to deal him. front. True to form, he also survived these A-1150 Vienna (phone 892-7359). He last saw his mother and two sisters setbacks. taken to the railway station for transpor He recently returned from a '45 Aid So Dutch pensions update tation to Treblinka. ciety' reunion in Israel attended by many Whereas previously the Inland Revenue For the more than a year Koppel under of the 620 child survivors who came to had agreed that Dutch WUV pensions took tasks for the police around the town, the UK from the camps. Meeting othef were exempt from United Kingdom tax, but in 1943 he was deported to a concen Forty-Fivers - as well as such of Israel'* rules have been amended so that the tration camp which supplied an Men of Destiny as President Weizmann exemption will no longer apply automati ammunition factory with slave labour. A and Prime Minister Rabin - went som^ cally where the award is made on or after year later he was sent to Buchenwald and way towards alleviating the sadness of hi* 13th April 1995.

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